Wake up. We have no more time for dilly dallying. The world needs you to show up, break the mould you were poured into by virtue of your family of origin, your religious conditioning or your gender role. It needs you to wake up and sing your song, write your book, tell your story, make your art, plant your garden.

I have learned to discern where the fibres of bone and marrow meet at the intersection of spiritual abuse and underlying mental illness. I have deeply studied the connection between evil and stupidity, and noticed how the capacity for addiction often indicates a commensurate capacity for spiritual power and awareness. I have made detailed notes about where intent ends and consequences begin, where family of origin patterns lay the groundwork for enabling harm, and where that groundwork overlaps with the safety and survival of individual members. I have mapped the subtle but discernible differences between a psychotic break and a spiritual awakening. I have circumnavigated the delicate meeting place between shamanic power, spiritual anointing and energetic intelligence.

An amazing thing happens in this part of the journey. I find that my own cosmic cocoon is transparent to a certain number of close friends and companions. They can see it because they know it; they have also been initiated by the cocoon and so it holds no terror for them, to see me undergoing it. They are the Mystery-Holders for this part of my initiation and the astonishing and scandalous grace of it all is that I get to have them by my side through the whole thing.

In the fluid horror of the dark deep, I am invited to meet my own adaptability, supple strength, fluidity and resourcefulness in the motif of the octopus. As I watch myself in octopus form, tentacles curling gracefully in and out, shifting with the current, methodical, slow, magical, measured my frightened, ragged breathing slowly give way to the kinaesthetic mysticism of measured inhale and exhale with the octopus, and the Big Task facing me starts to lose its power to halt my forward motion, to freeze me in place.

I only just have time to catch my breath on this new horizon before the fire comes to burn away anything I don’t need anymore. Which is most things, as it turns out. This stage teaches me that we really need only one thing; unconditional love. And that is always available to us as close as our next breath in this abundant universe stitched together by Love. Anything that cannot resonate at the frequency of unconditional love now has to go. And so the fire is here for it. And with the fire comes grief for what is burning.

There are things I learn from that experience that I will never be able to translate into language. They are Knowings that go deeper than language, and as such, are the fingerprint of Divine. They are planted in me, like a series of internal way-showers, map-markers, energetic signposts. They cannot be explained or described, they are simply Known, where once they were not-known.

This place might sound sad or lonely to you, if you yourself have not been invited to live here. It might even sound terrifying.

It is not sad. It is many things, but sad isn’t one of them.

It is wild and generous, untamed and scandalously beautiful. It echoes with many millennia of sacred songs, thrums with the beating of a million hearts and two million feet dancing the ancient mandala of life and love and bearing witness to the unfoldment of all of creation. It is holy and unspeakable and I never want to leave.